LaPuzz earned two Bronze Stars and other medals. / Courtesy of John LaPuzz

by Dustin Racioppi, USA TODAY

by Dustin Racioppi, USA TODAY

Seventy years after shrapnel from German mortar fire tore into his right shoulder, John LaPuzz got his proper recognition this winter at a veterans home in Paramus, N.J.

A clerical error in his discharge from the Army led LaPuzz on a decades-long battle to claim the Purple Heart medal he had earned in the bloody fields of Italy a month after D-Day.

LaPuzz enlisted in the Army at a post office in Paterson, N.J., his hometown, in 1940, a year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese pulled the United States into what would become the deadliest conflict in history.

LaPuzz was stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey and served for a time on shore patrol in Atlantic City as German submarines hunted supply ships off the coast. He was deployed to Europe in May 1944, according to the Army.

On D-Day in 1944, when Allied troops invaded coastal France to open a new front against Nazi Germany, the private first class was "in Italy someplace" with the Army's 363rd Infantry Regiment. As the Allies gained more ground in Europe, LaPuzz, originally a light-truck driver, quickly got a new job.

"The sergeant threw a machine gun in my hands. I caught it. I said, 'Sergeant, I'm a truck driver.' He says, 'As of now you're a machine gunner.'" LaPuzz, 96, recalls. "I says, 'Well I don't know how to fire a machine gun.' He says, 'You'll soon learn.' And boy, I did."

LaPuzz's accuracy and combat skill would later be cited by the Army.

On July 29, 1944, LaPuzz's unit was traveling in a 2.5-ton vehicle near the Rapido River. A German mortar shell exploded in front of the truck, LaPuzz says. The truck swerved, and men piled up on one another.

"I felt something warm running down my shoulder, and I looked and I pulled, and I picked up a fragment" of shrapnel that had wounded him, LaPuzz says.

After spending 29 days in a field hospital recovering, LaPuzz was offered a job delivering mail to troops. He opted to return to the front lines, he says, because "I had to fight again."

He would go on to fight heroically, according to Army records, in battles in the North Appenines and Po Valley as well as in the Rome-Arno campaign.

LaPuzz earned two Bronze Stars and other medals for his service in the war, but upon discharge at Fort Dix in 1945, the shrapnel wound that qualified him for the Purple Heart was overlooked by a clerk. LaPuzz struggled for 50 years, working through different veterans organizations, to get the error fixed and receive the Purple Heart. One significant roadblock was that his original discharge papers were destroyed in a fire.

His daughter, Paula, unearthed a telegram the Army sent to LaPuzz's mother notifying her that her son "was slightly wounded in action in Italy." Last August, with additional proof and the help of a county veterans officer and New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell, a review by the Army Board for Correction of Military Records was expedited.

LaPuzz received the Purple Heart on Jan. 17 in a ceremony at the veterans home in Paramus, where he lives.

It was gratifying, even if it was delayed, because when he was a young private facing death, LaPuzz says, "I didn't care. I was a soldier."